Recipient of the Friends of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation Scholarship in 2026

I came to Zurich at the point when my thesis had found its subject, but not yet its final form. I was working on James Joyce’s voluntary exile between Dublin and Trieste, and the weeks at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation became the point at which the different parts of that research began to hold together.

What mattered most was that the Foundation never felt like a place in which one simply arrived, consulted a collection, and left. I could move from the shelves to a discussion, from a question raised in conversation back to a text and discover that the text no longer looked the same. My survey of decades of Joyce scholarship, together with the Foundation’s archival materials.

The same was true beyond the desk. Participating in the Foundation’s events, meeting scholars and visitors, and sharing days with people for whom Joyce remains a living intellectual presence gave the stay an atmosphere I had never encountered elsewhere. Research there was serious without becoming closed, and scholarly life continued naturally through conversation.

I left Zurich with a stronger thesis, but also with a different sense of what a research environment can be. The scholarship gave me access to materials; the Foundation gave those materials a world in which they could speak.

Padua, September 2026